After Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, Disney and Lucasfilm swung heavily toward television series for the Star Wars universe. There has been talk about a new film starring Daisy Ridley as Rey Skywalker trying to resurrect the Jedi order, but nothing concrete is in the works yet. But that doesn't mean the end of Star Wars feature films.
Star Wars: Starfighter is a video game that was released in 2001. But it's also the next Star Wars movie from Lucasfilm. The official announcement was made yesterday during a Star Wars Celebration event in Tokyo. There's even a short teaser, although with little information.
The movie will be directed by Shawn Levy and will star Ryan Gosling. It will be set a few years after the events of The Rise of Skywalker, but Star Wars: Starfighter will be a standalone feature with all new characters. Filming is scheduled to begin this fall, and the projected released date will be May 28, 2027. Read what we know about Star Wars: Starfighter so far at People.
When French metal band Eons of Decay needed a video for their song "The Perfect Storm," they enlisted the talents of Fabrice Mathieu, who has delighted us with his film mashups for years. Mathieu turned to popular science fiction, dystopian, and disaster movies and used clips from more than 50 of them to illustrate how awful a perfect storm could be. Things go from bad to worse as we see war, wildfires, earthquakes, tornadoes, volcanic eruptions, urban overcrowding, sandstorms, economic collapse, floods, asteroids, and the general mayhem that you would expect from armageddon. If you enjoy such mashups but you don't care for heavy metal, you should watch with the sound off to wallow in the utter destruction that Hollywood offers us, and tell yourself "It's just a movie..." In case you you don't recognize the clips, there's a list of the movies used at the YouTube page, under "more." -Thanks Fabrice!
Only in Florida 😂😂 pic.twitter.com/H6QTc8kMru
— Nature is Amazing ☘️ (@AMAZlNGNATURE) April 18, 2025
I used to live in Florida. I like to hike, but avoided doing so in Florida. It's just too dangerous because of the wildlife. Even the delights of tubing down the Ichetuknee River are hard to enjoy when one is constantly watching for water moccasins.
Florida Man is the apex predator in Florida, but alligators routinely challenge him for that title. Here are two in the town of Ave Maria, a Catholic community in the southern part of the state. I doubt that they rang the doorbell because they have cookies to sell.
-via Jonah Goldberg
Dante Boccuzzi is among the most accomplished and sought-after chefs in the world. The Takeout reports that his restaurant in his native city of Cleveland occupies a building erected in 1924 as the Lincoln Heights Savings and Loan. Since it was built as a bank, its architecture includes the features that you would expect of one, including a vault.
If you're able to get a reservation for it, you and three other people can dine at the vault table. It was created at great trouble, as installing ventilation required jackhammering through a foot and a half of concrete. But don't shut the door anyway.
Photo: Dante Dining Group
The South China Morning Post reports an elite restaurant in Shanghai is offering a 15-course meal inspired by the rainforests of the Yunnan province. It culminates in a dessert which consists of flowers resting on a bed of elephant poop.
The poop has been sanitized and thus passes national food safety standards. The entire meal is popular and is drawing many people who are willing to fork over the equivalent of $550 USD for the feast. Some online commentators are skeptical, though, including one who said that "This feels like a grand-scale humiliation and an obedience test for the wealthy."
-via Dave Barry | Photo: 163.com
Malaysian-Chinese residential tower superstition. All floors with a 4 in it are the lower floor plus an A (Eg floor 4 is 3A, 14 is 13A, 24 is 23A, 34 is 33A) pic.twitter.com/uuWO6dZXse
— JR Urbane Network (@JRUrbaneNetwork) March 14, 2025
In the book Malaysia by Heidi Munan, Yuk Yee Foo, and Jo-Ann Spilling, the authors explain that the word "four" sounds like the Chinese word si, which means "death." It is therefore unlucky and people avoid it. License plates that end with the numeral 4 are undesirable. In contrast, "eight" sounds like the word for "prosperity" and is thus considered auspicious.
-via Super Punch
Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce represented her homeland of Jamaica in the 2008, 2012, 2016, and 2020 Olympic Games, winning three gold medals, four silver, and one bronze. Her specialty is the 100 meter dash and her personal record for that distance is 10.60 seconds. She holds the Guinness World Record for the most number of Olympic medals in the 100 meter race for a woman.
She's also a mom, having given birth her son, Zyon, in 2017. When Zyon's school held a race for parents--specifically, 100 meters--she joined in. Sports Illustrated reports that she won handily this time, as she did during a similar race in 2023.
There's no mention of who took the silver medal in this particular race.
-via Kottke
About a fortnight ago, we showed readers the innovative dishwasher developed by the STS 3D robotics firm and YouTuber Plumber John. That dishwasher cleaned dishes more brutally and effectively than any other dishwasher on Earth. It agitated the dishes with such intensity that only a few seconds is necessary to completely transform your dishes into a nearly unimaginable state.
Now the inventors are back with an improved design focused on the professional food service industry. Restaurants need to process dishes very quickly, so this dishwasher has a flame-powered dryer function, an auto-eject function capable of moving dishes out of the unit at high velocity, and heat-powered sanitation process.
My suggestion for the next step: the addition of a W54 warhead to ensure that no bacteria remain.
-via David Thompson
You may have seen a blurb or a passing headline about a musician who was still composing and playing music with his brain after his death. These stories are referring to experimental American composer Alvin Lucier, who died in 2021. Lucier gave his full cooperation to the experiment, which is more of an art installation entitled Revivification. But it's a stretch to say the installation includes Lucier's brain. The musician's brain is not a part of it.
What they did was to collect white cells from blood that Lucier has donated prior to his death, and comb through those to find stem cells. Stem cells can be stimulated to form many different tissues and organs. Lucier's living stem cells were prodded into forming a cerebral organoid, or a clump of brain tissue. The organoid is hooked up to a set of twenty brass plates and mallets, and the electrical activity causes the mallets to strike the plates. But is this music from Alvin Lucier after his death, or something else entirely? An article at Futurism explains this experimental art installation, but does not tell us whether the sounds of Revivification resemble music at all, or whether that music is good. -via Strange Company
(Image credit: Stephen Malagodi/Non Event)
How many legs must a robot have to navigate over various obstacles in the terrain? Or does it really matter? Maybe the type of feet matter more than the number of legs. Or maybe the size of those feet are key. The Brick Experiment Channel built five different types of walking machines out of LEGO blocks and pieces, and then subjected each of them to seven different obstacles to see which design worked best. None of them had an easy time. Well, one did, but I won't tell you which one because this is a competition on video, and you may get really invested in your favorite walker robot. I will go as far as to express sympathy for the "simple 2-legged walker" because that little guy has no talent for walking whatsoever and no clue going into an obstacle. Yes, it's okay to laugh at a machine that doesn't work properly.
If you'd like to know more about these five walkers, you can see how they were built in this video. -via Metafilter
We've read about amazing dogs who can smell cancer and other human conditions, and now we know at least one person who can sniff out diagnoses like diabetes and Parkinson's disease. Joy Milne, 75-year-old Scottish woman, always knew that she had an extraordinarily sensitive sense of smell, which runs in her family. She could smell a change in her husband's scent years before he was diagnosed with Parkinson's. In a test, Milne was challenged with t-shirts worn by Parkinson's patients and by healthy controls. She only missed one, when she identified a control as a Parkinson's patient, but that volunteer was diagnosed with Parkinson's a few months later!
Milne is now working with researchers to help isolate the substance that causes the smell that tells her of Parkinson's. Read about Milne's unusual talents that may lead to a diagnostic breakthrough at My Modern Met. -via Damn Interesting
There are certain species that can walk on the surface of water. Don't try this at home, because humans and most animals are far too heavy to even attempt it. But these insects have found their ecological niche because there are other species that don't have the same talents, and they can be eaten. These water walkers each use their own different method for moving about on the surface of water: walking, rowing, jumping, surfing, and even a sort of jet propulsion. They've developed these techniques and even specialized body parts to harness the science of fluid dynamics, meaning surface tension and capillary action, to out-maneuver whatever it is they want to eat. Yeah, there's plenty of science here to interest you, but this is also a True Facts video, so you get Ze Frank cracking jokes and making fun of these talented little creatures. There's a 65-second skippable ad at 4:56.
In Novaria di Sicilia, a neighborhood of Messina, people play an unusual sport as part of the Carnival celebrations. It's called Lancio del Mairochino.
Traditional Sports explains that residents take a wheel of the local pecorino cheese and wrap it with a 3-meter long length of twine. Then they take turns hurling the cheese down the street, using the string as a sling. The goal is to reach the bottom of the hill with as few tosses as possible.
The sport dates back to the 1600s when cheesemakers practiced the sport as a way to test the hardness of a cheese and thus its readiness for consumption.
-via Massimo
English is a weird language. It has evolved over centuries while also incorporating words from other languages until it's become fertile ground producing tons of puns. You'd think someone would try to do something about that. Well, they have. There's been a movement for hundreds of years to make English words easier by spelling them the way they are pronounced. Proponents say this would make spelling more consistent across the board, and we might even be able to drop a few of the 26 letters of the alphabet. But it doesn't really work that way.
“I attrybute my suksess in life to mi devoshun to spelyng.” –Josh Billings
When you spell words as they are pronounced, you find that it's honestly a chore to read them. And they look funny. While serious linguists were just trying to make reading and writing easier, simplified spelling made the writer seem undereducated, to say the least. Quite a few humorists jumped onto the simplified spelling bandwagon as a means of comedy, including Mark Twain. Read about the comedy backlash to the simplified spelling movement and the giggles they produced at LitHub. -via Damn Interesting
(Image credit: Cbaile19)
The What If? series from Randall Munroe and Henry Reich (previously at Neatorama) seeks to give serious answers to ridiculous theoretical questions. The most common question they receive, over and over, is "What would happen if the sun went out?" This is also a common question outside of the series, too. What they are actually asking is how long would it be before we all froze to death. The answer varies, because humans know how to keep warm up to a point. But we would lose our light, our food supplies, and pretty soon our orbit. Since those scenarios have been addressed all around the internet, Munroe and Reich decided to look at the bright side, as if there is one. The lack of a sun would actually solve some problems we have here on earth. Not that any of that makes up for freezing to death, but here you are anyway with a list of benefits from the sun ceasing to burn.
